ANTHRAX (10/24) - Source of mail still a mystery

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Germ-Laced Mail's Source Still a Mystery Investigators Find No 'Conclusive Link' Between Anthrax Scare, Sept. 11 Attacks

By Dan Eggen and Peter Slevin Washington Post Staff Writers Wednesday, October 24, 2001; Page A01

More than two weeks after Florida photo editor Bob Stevens died of anthrax, federal investigators still have no firm idea who is sending envelopes of the deadly microbe through the mail or what is motivating the attacks, according to lawmakers, public health experts and law enforcement officials.

Hundreds of FBI agents and postal inspectors have been dispatched to New Jersey in an attempt to find the source of three letters containing anthrax spores that were postmarked in Trenton. Tests and interviews have confirmed a trail of contamination in a Hamilton Township distribution facility but have yielded no clear link to a culprit, FBI officials said.

Other agents have returned to the U.S. apartments and haunts of the 19 hijackers who carried out the Sept. 11 terrorist assaults and their suspected associates, retrieving samples to test for anthrax spores and reinterviewing witnesses. Thousands of other agents are investigating additional leads, hoax mailings and false alarms.

Some White House officials and Capitol Hill lawmakers repeated yesterday that there may be a link between the anthrax scare and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network, which is blamed for the attacks on New York and Washington.

"There is a suspicion that this is connected to international terrorists," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters, adding that a link with the Sept. 11 attacks has been "the operating suspicion of the White House for a considerable period of time."

House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) said after meeting with President Bush yesterday that there was consensus in suspecting a link between the Sept. 11 attacks and anthrax. "I don't think there's a way to prove that, but I think we all suspect that," Gephardt said.

Gephardt also described the anthrax bacteria used in a letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) as "weapons grade," saying the small size of the particles was evidence it had been "milled."

"This is highly sophisticated material," he said. "It is small in size, and it aerosolizes."

But investigators have found no connection between the Sept. 11 plot and the anthrax mailings, numerous officials said yesterday. Although they continue to operate under the assumption that there might be a link, investigators from the FBI, the U.S. Postal Service and other agencies say privately that the mailings do not have the earmarks of an al Qaeda terrorist operation and seem more likely to have come from a domestic source.

"We are not able to rule out an association with the terrorist acts of September the 11th, but neither are we able to draw a conclusive link at this time," Attorney General John D. Ashcroft said yesterday.

Dan Mihalko, a spokesman for the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, said investigators are not close to figuring out who is behind the mailings. "I can't say we have narrowed the focus," he said. "This has the potential to be a long investigation."

In recent days, Bush administration officials also appear to be softening their public contentions that Iraq, which is known to have experimented with biological weapons, might be involved in the U.S. anthrax attacks.

The Justice Department, the FBI and the Postal Service have cloaked the anthrax probe, coordinated out of the FBI's Washington field office, in the same level of secrecy that has characterized the investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks, possibly obscuring key evidence from public view. And investigators say a break in the case could come at any time.

Still, the lack of solid clues and the difficulty of an investigation that relies largely on forensics have led to widespread frustration among authorities, as the number of anthrax infections and deaths increases.

Three people have died in Washington and Florida of inhalation anthrax -- the most lethal form of the disease -- and authorities revealed yesterday that they suspect a worker in the mail distribution center near Trenton has the same disease. Twelve people have been infected with either pulmonary or cutaneous forms of anthrax.

The most promising clues have been found in Trenton. At least three letters contaminated with anthrax spores passed through a postal sorting facility in Hamilton Township, and a mail carrier from West Trenton contracted skin anthrax -- raising the possibility that one or more of the letters were mailed along her postal route.

FBI agents and postal inspectors have blanketed that route in a search for clues. But the carrier, Teresa Heller, is unsure whether she contracted anthrax from a particular letter or from mail bins in her West Trenton post office that routinely go back and forth to the Hamilton sorting facility, according to three people who have been in contact with her recently.

Although investigators are considering the possibility that someone along Heller's postal route mailed a letter laced with anthrax bacteria, she has suggested to colleagues and others that someone could have put a letter in one of her patrons' personal mailboxes.

In addition, people sometimes stop their cars and hand her letters when they see her driving her mail route, one of her associates said. Another said a contaminated letter could have brushed up against one of her letters at the Hamilton Township facility.

Investigators have also conducted anthrax tests on a Jersey City apartment where two men in custody in connection with the terror probe once lived. Ayub Ali Khan and Mohammed Jaweed Azmath were detained Sept. 12 after being pulled off an Amtrak train in Texas. They had a large sum of cash, hair dye and box-cutter knives like those believed to have been used in the Sept. 11 attacks. Reporters from the Wall Street Journal recently discovered magazines containing stories about bioterrorism in the men's apartment and alerted the FBI.

Their former roommate, Mohammad Aslam Pervez, was indicted last week on charges he lied to the FBI about financial transactions. He is being held without bond.

Some hijackers frequented parts of New Jersey, which was also home to a terrorist cell connected to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. A dozen of the hijackers also lived at one time or another in South Florida, where Stevens worked at the Sun tabloid in the Boca Raton offices of American Media Inc.

Several hijackers or suspected associates, including alleged ringleader Mohamed Atta, are known to have inquired about crop-duster airplanes and their ability to carry large quantities of poison. Atta tried to buy one of the planes in Florida, and one man who investigators believe may have been a thwarted hijacker was found to have information on crop-dusting and wind currents on his computer after his August arrest in Minnesota.

Yet investigators have found "nothing that ties them in, so far," Judy Orihuela, spokeswoman for the FBI office in Miami, said yesterday.

The Justice Department yesterday released copies of the three letters containing anthrax spores that reached the offices of Daschle, NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw and the New York Post. All three end with the same sentence: "Death to America. Death to Israel. Allah is great."

Many experts believe the phrases are intended to wrongly cast suspicion on foreign terrorists. Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism official, said the block-like handwriting appears to belong to someone whose native language is English, rather than someone who learned to write from right to left, as in Arabic.

Daniel Benjamin, a former terrorism specialist at the National Security Council, said that although the anthrax attacks do not fit the al Qaeda pattern, bin Laden's network has "shown a remarkable ability to innovate tactics and to come up with a different means of attack virtually every time around."

"You absolutely cannot rule them out," said Benjamin, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "At the same time, their overriding interest is mass carnage, so there is some reason for skepticism. They have not traditionally sought to scare a lot of people. Usually, they want to kill a lot of people."

No American hate groups have demonstrated an ability to acquire and refine anthrax, said Mark Potok, who tracks U.S. extremist organizations for the Southern Poverty Law Center. He suspects the anthrax plot has a foreign origin.

"People on the radical right have been talking about biological and chemical weapons going back to the early to mid-1990s, but there really is not much to suggest that it's gone beyond talk," Potok said.



-- Anonymous, October 25, 2001


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